I’ve been working away in the scriptorium this week, not as diligently as I like, but diligently enough that some things long-planned are beginning to come to fruition. You probably know that the Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism are coming out (and will continue to come out over the upcoming week). What you may not know, unless you specially follow it, is that I’ve also been steadily at work over at the Fair Use Repository. In particular, I’m happy to announce that, as I suggested I might last week, I’m now happy to announce that the complete text of the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth is now available online at fair-use.org. In particular, if you haven’t yet, I would recommend taking a look at Guy Aldred’s essay That Economic Army (a reprint from the Spur). The obvious aspect of the essay is a long tirade against the hypocrisies of Labour Party politicians and trades unionists who are long since dead. But whether the polemic entertains you or not, underneath it there is also a really interesting analysis of how the pressure of state capitalism seizes and deforms individual people, and entire industries, into gears for the war machine, through what Aldred calls economic conscription, and how this constructs and confines their interests so as to create a shared interest in perpetuating war. (The question of course is how to become the sand in the gears, instead of the oil.) This next week, I’ll be working some more at Mother Earth and Liberty, and completing the first run of Bits & Pieces (that is, getting through the material that was actually presented at the APEE panel), and hopefully coming back around to some related commentary. Also got a big pile of contact information from the last couple weeks’ A-Cafes that needs to be processed.

That’s my Shamelessness for the week. What about y’all? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

—Rad Geek

Advertisement

Help me get rid of these Google ads with a gift
of $10.00 towards this month’s operating expenses for radgeek.com. See Donate for details.

I’m very happy with the new setup we have for the Thinking Liberty podcast. It should be a much cleaner, more reliable production that enables us to do more with the show. Last week we talked about transitioning to a consensual, individualist education system with a New Jersey public school teacher. This week Dan Patrick will talk with us about activism he’s involved in, including work with Iraq Veterans Against the War and Alliance of the Libertarian Left.

There’s also going to be an Alliance of the Libertarian Left picnic meeting in Passaic, NJ at 1-3pm on May 15. Anyone reading this who would like to come should email darianworden@gmail.com for directions. It’s easy to get to using public transit or driving.

I just finished revising the Collective Reason translation of Bellegarrigue’s “Au fait! Au fait!!” and have added some articles to the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. There are 20+ new titles at the Corvus Editions store, and a dozen more ready to list today. It was a good week for turning up interesting texts in unlikely places. John Beverley Robinson and Hugh O. Pentecost, for example, were contributors to the “Engineering Magazine” in 1891, and Robinson’s “What Is the Use of a Building Law” (available in various formats next week) is an unexpected bit of practical anarchism. I’m supposed to give a talk on DIY papermaking in the near future, so I’ve been experimenting with just how DIY I can get. I’ve managed to dip nice paper using cheesecloth stretched on an embroidery hoop, without a deckle. Today, I’ll see if I can do it consistently. If so, I’ve got a little print project I want to try with it.

Coalitions of the Willing

This site is designed to be accessible for any web device, including text-only browsers and browsers with aids for users with visual or motor disabilities. For details, see the accessibility statement for radgeek.com.